NYT: DNA linked to 2004 murder found on OWS chain may have come from lab contamination

posted at 10:09 pm on July 11, 2012 by Allahpundit

I think we all knew something was fishy about a scenario involving an Occupier behaving violently.

The DNA that investigators initially believed was recovered from skin cells on the slain woman’s portable compact disc player and from the chain found after the March protest came from a laboratory supervisor at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the person briefed on the matter said.

“The O.C.M.E. tainted the samples and it was the O.C.M.E. supervisor’s whose DNA was on both,” the person said.

But Ellen S. Borakove, a spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s Office, said, “We’ve excluded all medical examiner personnel.” She added that the office was still working on the test.

I’m not sure where that leaves us, but the New York Post — which had this story front page earlier today — is also hearing from sources that it’s a bad sample:

“The DNA was contaminated,” a source said today.

“It was a total screw up,” said another.

Another law enforcement source familiar with the unsolved Fox case said it was highly improbable that there was a real connection between the material on the chain and the DNA on the CD player.

“What are the chances that the killer came in contact with this chain and left his DNA on it all these years later?” the source said.

The prime suspect has already been excluded as a source of the DNA. I can’t understand where the contamination could have come from, though, if the medical examiners have all been ruled out. Maybe a cop who worked the 2004 murder and handled the CD player also, as chance would have it, ended up working the case involving Occupiers and the subway gate? You would think they’d have protocols to eliminate obvious sources of contamination before leaking a bombshell scoop to the New York media about unsolved cases and the Occupy crew.

Blowback

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So what’s the take-away here? That the MSM is incompetent or that the Medical Examiner’s office is? Or is it that no one was really prepared to be all that shocked that the OWS may have contained a murderer?

I wonder if that Occupy POS that SWATTED Erick Erickson or Aaron Worthing has been found. He did refer to MM’s missing cousin, Marizela Perez, in his phone call to one of them. That is worth looking into, IMO.

i know in the state of MA there were severe problems with evidence and the medical examiner’s office- severe and compromising enough to throw numerous convictions and rulings of cause of deaths into jeopardy.

there has been for some time a crisis in america with coroners( who are often not even doctors or trained in forensics) and medical examiners- how states and municipalities, cities/ towns, carry out these offices. what is presented on such shows as ‘Bones’, ‘NCIS’ etc bears little resemblance to the chaos and incompetence that plagues the offices and persons who determine cause of suspicious deaths and are charged with maintaining chain of evidence and appropriate procedures that would withstand scrutiny and challenges in a court room.

Yeah well, I’m sorry but this is a local NYC matter. The poor thing wanted to be a kool kid playing with the commie-anarchists and got herself killed, apparently. And we’re supposed to get all caught up in the blood work?

Yeah well, I’m sorry but this is a local NYC matter. The poor thing wanted to be a kool kid playing with the commie-anarchists and got herself killed, apparently. And we’re supposed to get all caught up in the blood work?

minnesoter

where do you pull this crap out of? she was a working class kid from jersey, a juilliard theatre student out for a jog and was murdered in 2004 in circumstances that resemble a sex crime- what the puck does that have to do with ‘ being kool’ and commies? it was 2004.

so disrespectful to this poor girl’s memory and her family- why don’t you read the actual stories first?

You would think they’d have protocols to eliminate obvious sources of contamination before leaking a bombshell scoop to the New York media about unsolved cases and the Occupy crew.

I agree. Think of what a disaster this could have turned into.

If people hadn’t caught this apparent error, it could have unfairly tarnished OWS’s otherwise exemplary reputation as a non-violent movement of law-abiding, responsible citizens, whose personal hygiene is beyond reproach.

If true, reminds me of a CSI:NY episode where they thought there was a serial killer in the city, but it turned out the person who made the q-tips used for swabbing hadn’t used gloves; thus she got her DNA “found” at the crime scenes.

Cmon, They are only into vandalism, rape, drugs, looting, theft of their fellow occupiers property, taking a dump in public, more rape, more drugs, more violence, attempt to blow up a bridge, racial hatred by biting off a finger of a black man in a wheelchair, violating squatter laws, noise ordinances broken, taking money from those that earned it, protesting bank officers at their homes and riots in the streets ……..so far.

I would think that the DNA recovered in 2004 has been locked away for years with only a printout of the results, making it highly unlikely that that was the source of the contamination, leaving… someone who was there in 2004?
Unless they want to say the missed labeled the samples, but they didn’t.

I’m still a bit curious as to why they were testing a chain used in a vandalism case for DNA in the first place. Is that something that normally would be done? Or was there something unusual about this chain or case of vandalism?

If only we came together back in the boom days of the Clinton era and passed Hillarycare without reading what would have been in it, and if only GW woulda signed off on the Kyoto protocol, we woulda fried that murderer by now. In Gov’t We Trust.

Funny, how Bill Ayers, was by his own admission ‘Free as a Bird’ Guilty of Sin’, how Kimberlin, somehow made it out of stir, how
the arson at Perry’s governors mansion, and Palin’s church, were
never solved,